in Digital Media at University of Washington

NowThisNews Reports in Just 15 Seconds with Instagram

Reporting the news has been transforming since the advent of technology became affordable for the general population and since then has reached the point where anyone can be a publisher of content. NowThisNews is taking this transformation one step further by shortening news updates to just 15 seconds on their Instagram platform. Typically, Instagram videos are created on the phone with stop motion videography. However, it is possible to upload a video that was created elsewhere and publish it through the platform as well. With, Vine, Twitter’s version of the Instagram Video, uploading content that was created somewhere else was not possible, nor was it encouraged. In fact, people who developed workarounds for this limitation found their videos quickly disappearing from the platform.

NowThisNews seems to prefer Instagram as their platform of choice perhaps for the additional 9 seconds of video time and because they wanted to publish content that was well developed, not to mention more efficient to create. Stop motion videography can be quite tricky on a smartphone. They do have a Vine videos as well, but they are of a very different format, generally someone talking quickly into the camera without any supporting graphics or background music.

I first found out about NowThisNews through an article on All Things D, a tech blog I read every day for work. In the article, they explain that this startup is backed by the same people responsible for Huffington Post as well as Buzz Feed.

While this delivery of the news doesn’t provide me with the deep insight and details that I prefer to know, it is an interesting way to deliver the highlights of the day in a visual headline -like strategy.

What do you think? Effective or too fast?

UDPATE: I tried to embed one of the Instagram posts here but it kept being eliminated at publishing. If anyone has any tips on this, please let me know. Thanks